63 ms·

I'll never understand why we're hell-bent on making sure people are driving around in cars. Instead of solving the problem of commuting by not having cars and b

I'll never understand why we're hell-bent on making sure people are driving around in cars. Instead of solving the problem of commuting by not having cars and by building better, we're just making commuting better and more optimized. It's so stupid. We should be making it so that you don't have to commute, not that you can do more work while you commute or w/e.

doggosphere 5y ago
People enjoy going to concerts, restaurants, seeing their family, etc.
- ericmay 5y ago
  Yea so you just go do those things. I'm not sure what this has to do with driving or commuting to a job on the highway?
  - doggosphere 5y ago
    How do you do those things without driving? Are you assuming everyone has access to effective and efficient public transportation?
    - ericmay 5y ago
      > Are you assuming everyone has access to effective and efficient public transportation? No.... I'm assuming we build that and design cities to be walkable and bike-able instead of just optimizing for car traffic. We can just build effective and efficient public transportation, maintain some of our current roads (so you can still have a car) and build cities and towns to be walkable and bike-able. > How do you do those things without driving? Idk. How do people all over the world do it today?
    - sellyme 5y ago
      > How do you do those things without driving? I typically walk. I take buses or trains if I need to go further than walking distance, which is fairly rare. > Are you assuming everyone has access to effective and efficient public transportation? That's usually what you'd build to get rid of cars, yes.
      - doggosphere 5y ago
        Have you ever lived outside a major city before, ie. a town of <200k?
kuratkull 5y ago
Driving is faster, your car is available virtually 24/7, you own(many animals like owning things) your car, you can personalize your car - in short, cars are personal, commuting is public. Also time is money.
- ericmay 5y ago
  > Driving is faster It's not, if you build correctly. It's only "faster" when you spread things out into suburbia. Is it faster for you to get in your car and drive next door or to just walk over there? Of course its faster to walk. Walking is faster. You can't just say "driving is faster" without qualifications. > your car is available virtually 24/7 So are your legs. Walk and bike. I don't see the relevance of many of these other items you mention. Who cares if you can personalize your car? I'm not saying cars should be banned, but we should stop optimizing for them at the expense of everything else, especially when they aren't necessary.
  - lazerpants 5y ago
    My work brings me into contact with many high net worth individuals in Manhattan. They all take cars most of the time. It is faster than the subway, usually, and even when it isn't you can get more done in the car. Even in the U.S.' most dense area driving is usually faster, and it is certainly more pleasant/productive. Edit: I'll note that many of them will take the subway during rush hour if both ends of the trip are within a couple of blocks of the subway. However, if there is a transfer they won't, the subway becomes time inefficient very quickly if you have to walk far from it or wait for multiple trains.
    - ericmay 5y ago
      Ok ok so now walk me through what this looks like if everybody in Manhattan takes a car.
      - lazerpants 5y ago
        Turns into a nightmare of course. But it's gated by how much you can afford to pay. The new congestion charges will really be a boon to the ultra-wealthy since the charges are minuscule compared to what they are willing to pay and it will get poorer drivers off the streets. I would prefer it if the congestion charges were scaled to usage rates for that reason (example, you can enter the toll zone once per month for free, but if you do it 20 times the toll eventually ends up being $100+ per journey). It seems more fair to me especially since a lot of people occasionally need to haul a box or something to Midtown, but don't usually contribute to traffic congestion.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ksd482 5y ago
People have already mentioned various reasons why owning a car is personal. So this means there is more incentive for companies to build cars -- more profit to be made. Public transport on the other hand, is a massive undertaking which involves a lot of politics. So it is not nearly as profitably or incentivized. I would personally like to see public transportation improved over cars, but I may be in the minority like you.
- ericmay 5y ago
  It's not just public transportation. Hell we don't even need it really. We could just build cities better so that yea sure your family can own a car, but most of the time you just walk out your front door to the things you need for most of the time. People have the same mentality around electric cars and range. They'll say, well I can't have an electric car because if I go on this road trip that I might do 3 days out of the year my electric car won't be able to handle that. But 99% of the time it covers your use cases... I know this is a losing battle though. We won't build public transportation, bike lanes, or sidewalks. There's little doubt that we'll ever do that. It's just frustrating that we're so intent on just driving everywhere, spending 45 minutes each way in a car, thousands of teenagers dying, vast amounts of pollution, an untold number of habitats destroyed, pavement and concrete everywhere, and it's just because we decided that every family should live in the suburbs and drive everywhere. There's no good reason. It's insanity.
dntrkv 5y ago
Autonomous driving is an extremely difficult problem, but it pales in comparison to the challenge of forcing a cultural shift away from driving and reimagining/rebuilding so many cities. Most Americans won't even entertain the thought of giving up their car even if alternative modes of transport make more sense.
- ksec 5y ago
  >Autonomous driving is an extremely difficult problem, Is it really that difficult? I often assume this difficulty comes from real world situation where you have human drivers on the same street and people walking pass. What if none of these are problems. And all cars in the X state have to be AV Lv4?
- ericmay 5y ago
  I know. We're so fucked because of it too. We've built a lot of infrastructure we can't afford to maintain and we're just building more and spreading out more. Getting fatter, more anti-social. Etc. Hard to be racist when your neighbor is black. A lot easier to do it while you scroll Facebook algorithms on your autonomous 45 minute drive to an office.
- rytor718 5y ago
  I second the OPs sentiment: we're "solving" the wrong problems in my opinion when it comes to transportation. But I think I disagree just a little with you that autonomous driving is extremely difficult, when the real difficulty is teaching a car to drive while sharing that road with human drivers. To the OPs point, if we were solving the problem of moving people from point A to point B, we'd realize that autonomous vehicles should not be on the road with people. They need dedicated roads, where the the problem is substantially easier to solve. We're working on the wrong problem. The question isn't "how to do we make cars drive themselves safely while people are on board" because we have mostly solved that ages ago (see airplanes, drones, etc). The problem that needs a solution is "how do we safely and efficiently move people from point A to point B in <any vehicle>". The former cannot be solved. The latter is substantially easier when you remove human drivers from the road. Now I'm not suggesting I know the solution here, but I'd like to think its pretty straightforward. Re-allocating roads for autonomous vehicles only seems like the right direction to start in. Because ideally you want to encourage people NOT to drive any way (its very expensive for most families and dangerous and tedious). You simultaneously begin to solve a host of problems: safety, remove gridlock, faster travel, cheaper. And I'm thinking all forms of transportation here, cars would be the least efficient of them all but they have an important role to play. Especially for last mile travel. Putting aside the challenges of car-culture and entrenched interests in the auto industry, if we can give autonomous vehicles their own roads, half the things we're trying to "solve" right now would become irrelevant.

doggosphere 5y ago

People enjoy going to concerts, restaurants, seeing their family, etc.

ericmay 5y ago
Yea so you just go do those things. I'm not sure what this has to do with driving or commuting to a job on the highway?
- doggosphere 5y ago
  How do you do those things without driving? Are you assuming everyone has access to effective and efficient public transportation?
  - ericmay 5y ago
    > Are you assuming everyone has access to effective and efficient public transportation? No.... I'm assuming we build that and design cities to be walkable and bike-able instead of just optimizing for car traffic. We can just build effective and efficient public transportation, maintain some of our current roads (so you can still have a car) and build cities and towns to be walkable and bike-able. > How do you do those things without driving? Idk. How do people all over the world do it today?
  - sellyme 5y ago
    > How do you do those things without driving? I typically walk. I take buses or trains if I need to go further than walking distance, which is fairly rare. > Are you assuming everyone has access to effective and efficient public transportation? That's usually what you'd build to get rid of cars, yes.
    - doggosphere 5y ago
      Have you ever lived outside a major city before, ie. a town of <200k?

kuratkull 5y ago

Driving is faster, your car is available virtually 24/7, you own(many animals like owning things) your car, you can personalize your car - in short, cars are personal, commuting is public. Also time is money.

ericmay 5y ago
> Driving is faster It's not, if you build correctly. It's only "faster" when you spread things out into suburbia. Is it faster for you to get in your car and drive next door or to just walk over there? Of course its faster to walk. Walking is faster. You can't just say "driving is faster" without qualifications. > your car is available virtually 24/7 So are your legs. Walk and bike. I don't see the relevance of many of these other items you mention. Who cares if you can personalize your car? I'm not saying cars should be banned, but we should stop optimizing for them at the expense of everything else, especially when they aren't necessary.
- lazerpants 5y ago
  My work brings me into contact with many high net worth individuals in Manhattan. They all take cars most of the time. It is faster than the subway, usually, and even when it isn't you can get more done in the car. Even in the U.S.' most dense area driving is usually faster, and it is certainly more pleasant/productive. Edit: I'll note that many of them will take the subway during rush hour if both ends of the trip are within a couple of blocks of the subway. However, if there is a transfer they won't, the subway becomes time inefficient very quickly if you have to walk far from it or wait for multiple trains.
  - ericmay 5y ago
    Ok ok so now walk me through what this looks like if everybody in Manhattan takes a car.
    - lazerpants 5y ago
      Turns into a nightmare of course. But it's gated by how much you can afford to pay. The new congestion charges will really be a boon to the ultra-wealthy since the charges are minuscule compared to what they are willing to pay and it will get poorer drivers off the streets. I would prefer it if the congestion charges were scaled to usage rates for that reason (example, you can enter the toll zone once per month for free, but if you do it 20 times the toll eventually ends up being $100+ per journey). It seems more fair to me especially since a lot of people occasionally need to haul a box or something to Midtown, but don't usually contribute to traffic congestion.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ksd482 5y ago

People have already mentioned various reasons why owning a car is personal. So this means there is more incentive for companies to build cars -- more profit to be made. Public transport on the other hand, is a massive undertaking which involves a lot of politics. So it is not nearly as profitably or incentivized. I would personally like to see public transportation improved over cars, but I may be in the minority like you.

ericmay 5y ago
It's not just public transportation. Hell we don't even need it really. We could just build cities better so that yea sure your family can own a car, but most of the time you just walk out your front door to the things you need for most of the time. People have the same mentality around electric cars and range. They'll say, well I can't have an electric car because if I go on this road trip that I might do 3 days out of the year my electric car won't be able to handle that. But 99% of the time it covers your use cases... I know this is a losing battle though. We won't build public transportation, bike lanes, or sidewalks. There's little doubt that we'll ever do that. It's just frustrating that we're so intent on just driving everywhere, spending 45 minutes each way in a car, thousands of teenagers dying, vast amounts of pollution, an untold number of habitats destroyed, pavement and concrete everywhere, and it's just because we decided that every family should live in the suburbs and drive everywhere. There's no good reason. It's insanity.

dntrkv 5y ago

Autonomous driving is an extremely difficult problem, but it pales in comparison to the challenge of forcing a cultural shift away from driving and reimagining/rebuilding so many cities. Most Americans won't even entertain the thought of giving up their car even if alternative modes of transport make more sense.

ksec 5y ago
>Autonomous driving is an extremely difficult problem, Is it really that difficult? I often assume this difficulty comes from real world situation where you have human drivers on the same street and people walking pass. What if none of these are problems. And all cars in the X state have to be AV Lv4?
ericmay 5y ago
I know. We're so fucked because of it too. We've built a lot of infrastructure we can't afford to maintain and we're just building more and spreading out more. Getting fatter, more anti-social. Etc. Hard to be racist when your neighbor is black. A lot easier to do it while you scroll Facebook algorithms on your autonomous 45 minute drive to an office.
rytor718 5y ago
I second the OPs sentiment: we're "solving" the wrong problems in my opinion when it comes to transportation. But I think I disagree just a little with you that autonomous driving is extremely difficult, when the real difficulty is teaching a car to drive while sharing that road with human drivers. To the OPs point, if we were solving the problem of moving people from point A to point B, we'd realize that autonomous vehicles should not be on the road with people. They need dedicated roads, where the the problem is substantially easier to solve. We're working on the wrong problem. The question isn't "how to do we make cars drive themselves safely while people are on board" because we have mostly solved that ages ago (see airplanes, drones, etc). The problem that needs a solution is "how do we safely and efficiently move people from point A to point B in <any vehicle>". The former cannot be solved. The latter is substantially easier when you remove human drivers from the road. Now I'm not suggesting I know the solution here, but I'd like to think its pretty straightforward. Re-allocating roads for autonomous vehicles only seems like the right direction to start in. Because ideally you want to encourage people NOT to drive any way (its very expensive for most families and dangerous and tedious). You simultaneously begin to solve a host of problems: safety, remove gridlock, faster travel, cheaper. And I'm thinking all forms of transportation here, cars would be the least efficient of them all but they have an important role to play. Especially for last mile travel. Putting aside the challenges of car-culture and entrenched interests in the auto industry, if we can give autonomous vehicles their own roads, half the things we're trying to "solve" right now would become irrelevant.